The iPhone is many things beside a phone of course, and what must be the most-used feature is audio – usually music. And audio impinges heavily on the reading experience as well, whether it’s listening to an album while you’re reading, or making the full transition to an audiobook read in a lively and entertaining style. (The audiobook has been around for many years now, from those huge tape packs you used to buy for long car journeys, through CDs to a new lease of life as mp3s from retailers like Audible and iTunes. The fact that audiobooks frequently outsell the hardback edition of many books is a direct but little-quoted challenge to the persistent idea that the physical, paper book is the only “real” way to read.) (more…)
Tag: feature
Feature: Tilt Scrolling! 30/08/09
One of the most contentious subjects in ebook design is page flow. We’ve been working with text online for a long time, and even before you get into ebooks, there’s a whole range of options. (more…)
Feature: Bookmarking 29/08/09
If you’re anything like us, reading books is not a passive experience. Underlining, dog-earing and note-taking are all part of the experience (even the latter for die-hard the-book-is-sacred non-markers). And sharing those bookmarks is important too, whether it’s quoting a passage to a friend, or blogging all the dog-eared pages. (more…)
Feature: In App News 29/08/09
One of the beauties of the iPhone is the fact that it’s (almost) always connected – there’s a world of information always at your fingertips, and we felt that this connectedness should be built into the books themselves to enrich the experience.
The urge to know more about a book and its authors is a common one among readers, but the reading experience is often divorced from the book’s own life out in the world – reviews, author appearances and events. (more…)
Feature: Type options and settings 28/08/09
There’s a lot of hot air talked about sans- and serif fonts, and what’s best for reading. The common view is that serif fonts are best – something about the serif marks (the little lines at the end of the letterforms) making it easier for the eye to flow along the line. (more…)
Tags: design, ebooks, enhanced editions, ereader, feature, fonts, iphone, night mode, sans-serif, serif
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Feature: Full Text Search 28/08/09
The promise of full-text search is one of the great hopes of ebooks, as well as digitisation programmes like Project Gutenberg and Google Book Search: the ability to comb whole books and libraries to find the information you need. (more…)
Feature: Watching Video in an Enhanced Edition 24/08/09
One of the most obvious things you can do in a multimedia ebook is insert video. (more…)
